“What’s Happening Today?” offers an unexpected escape into humor and philosophy.
By Sydney Nguyen ’20 and Will Aarons ‘20
In a world occupied by social media behemoths, Skype for Business, a corporation-focused communication tool, can seem overshadowed by leviathans like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. But necessity is the mother of invention, and Cary Academy Upper Schoolers, looking for a convenient platform for self-expression, have exploited Skype for Business’s unique interface to create a microculture ex-nihilo. But what can this humble messaging platform offer to the teen whose gleaming screens are oft illuminated by scintillating notifications from Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley darlings? Perhaps it’s Skype for Business’ privacy that makes it such a gripping platform.
While other internet media are convenient modes of mass-broadcasting, Skype for Business (hereafter referred to as “SfB”, or, simply, “Skype”) is, at its core, an intimate communicative channel. First, SfB is constitutively a direct messaging application. You only get notified when someone intends to contact you – not their thousands of followers (shoutout Vmoney), but you. Second, contact lists are individually curated, and invisible to the public eye. You can’t see another person’s status unless you’ve both added each other, in a breathtaking égalité rarely seen in social media. It’s a tradeoff between breadth and depth – while our platforms are narrower, our voices are louder. On SfB, we speak our truths under the safety of surreptitiousness.
Amidst Cary Academy’s hollow pillars, students have subverted the platform’s original mission. While Bill Gates and his corporate hacks likely designed this innocuous “business” app to fortify Western capitalism through instantaneous communication (collusion?), young intellectuals at CA have exploited its functions to unite the student body one message at a time, subverting the oligarchical and individualistic mindset undergirding the broader educational-industrial complex. How ironic that the ruling class has unwittingly sown the seeds of its own demise!
In pursuit of grassroots ventures, Cary Academy students use SfB to instant message friends and foes (both in and out of class), voice call, manipulate their activity status from “Available” to “Away” and back again, and participate in video calls that are either lovers’ trysts for a modern era or war conferences to arm oneself before an ill-timed exam. Most of these functions are relatively discreet: your messages are only visible to you and your confabulator, and a tell-tale red dot beside your profile picture is the only sign that you may be in kahoots with another user, though the identity of that parleyer remains unknown to your contact list.
The status, on the other hand, is the only public expression that SfB allows, packaged enticingly in a familiar speech bubble that floats above the otherwise rigid interface. The azure box possesses the bewildering pulchritude of a cooling oasis – once you lap at its limpid shores, your thirst for self-expression is unquenchable. It is truly a trough for the masses: though not all drink, all are intoxicated.
The dizzying lingua franca of cabals of SfB friends (either “Favorite”-d or “Other”-ed into two castes of contacts) creates an argot born within the CA community, a linguistic island of witticisms, grievances, fragments, and preambles that could only be deciphered within the coteries of our SfB accounts. This shared language forms a bridge between students who focus on only their own successes on the academic battlefield. In a world rife with misunderstandings, SfB provides the clarity of the very freest form of expression.
We scroll raptly through our contact lists, perusing the sum total of our peers’ experiences. The scrutiny is almost freeing – like in the Panopticon, we are prisoners who are given the power to surveil each other, while being eyed by a central, higher power. It’s an electrifying sense of imminence – everything on Skype is True, even if only for a minute. This precious veracity raises a conundrum that has no answer: Which is my true body, and which is my avatar? Can I, in my real life, ever express myself with the delicate rampancy that is uncorked by the Skype?
In forging my statuses, I (Will) crave a form of fugitivity. Rather than conveying, I obfuscate. Maybe the two friends sitting next to me understand what I write. Maybe no one does. I encode myself with skillful artifice and then revel in my own individuality. On Skype for Business, I can create something of my own and instantly flaunt how different I am from the pack. I perform daily my struggle to recognize myself, to construct a binary opposition between my Self and the world. It’s an ongoing game of “Where’s Waldo?” in which I simultaneously seek and am sought by myself. But as much as my statuses represent a personal, identarian pursuit, I also relish the attention that they yield. When I plaster something cryptic up there, I pray that someone, anyone, will message me, begging to know what it means. Little do they know, I seldom have the answer either.
Ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short) – but if the SfB status is a unique form of art, perhaps their fleeting moments on our screens stretch the meaning clustered within our short lives. I (Sydney) often say that when my mind is in turmoil, so too are my Skype statuses, changing rapidly with every passing mood or event. Like temporary milestones along the Daedalian road of life, these statuses mark brief moments of clarity, moments where I stop, amidst the madness, to shout into the void. With the amplifying power of the status, even instances of normalcy are crowned watersheds of their own right, while instances of disquietude are put into grand perspective. Seeing my expressions of anxiety reduced to an ambivalent Calibri and listed among my contemporaries’ statuses lends my own statuses and burdens a calming uniformity – the even-handedness by which our quotations are published is a surefire remedy for the solipsism that other social media only stokes.
For others, the Skype status isn’t a monolithic cultural element – it is a living, breathing modem that transmutes by the trimester. As Erin Singleton (‘20) explains, “[Skype statuses] are like pop culture for the CA community. They act as small pieces that represent a bigger community, and a lot of key events and things are expressed.”
The status is whimsical. It welcomes explanation yet requires none. Students often post their “hot takes” on Skype, trying to get the biggest rise out of their contacts list. Others go a more personal route. Users might tout their achievements of getting a “breadstick double bagel,” or 100%, on a recent Chemistry test and soon after “mourn the loss of [their] deceased AirPods.”
On the surface, though, Skype statuses seem “not that deep.” Eric Xing (‘20) “button [mashes] until [he gets] something that [looks] cool.” But no matter how cryptic, chaotic, or random, every combination of 510 Unicode characters discloses a fractal of the self. During our four years of high school, we scrounge for our purpose, our future, and our personhood. On Skype for Business, we chronicle that journey, not on curated Facebook timelines, but with discrete and discreet droplets in the rivers of our experience. And although we otherwise search for neat and static ways to package our lives (to friends, to colleges, to ourselves), our switching statuses quietly remind us that we are always in flux. SfB empowers us to vacillate, experiment, redefine. Its functionalities restrict us from reminiscing about defunct statuses or fixating on the past, but in doing so, they free us from living up to anything except our own spontaneity. In a culture infatuated with material progress (in which we constantly reflect on the past, constantly evaluate ourselves against our histories, and constantly premeditate our trajectories), Skype for Business ensures that we appreciate the fleeting beauty of “What’s happening today.”